Robert Louis Stevenson
Stevenson’s brooding historical romance demonstrates his most abiding theme—the elemental struggle between good and evil—as it unfolds against a hauntingly beautiful Scottish landscape, amid the fierce loyalties and violent enmities that characterized Scottish history. When two brothers attempt to split their loyalties between the warring factions of the 1745 Jacobite rising, one family finds itself tragically divided.
Excerpt:
"It was late in November 1456. The snow fell over Paris with rigorous, relentless persistence; sometimes the wind made a sally and scattered it in flying vortices; sometimes there was a lull, and flake after flake descended out of the black night air, silent, circuitous, interminable. To poor people, looking up under moist eyebrows, it seemed a wonder where it all came from. Master Francis Villon had propounded an alternative
...The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is the classic novella of split personality. Stevenson wrote it in just a few days while sick and bedridden, and famously burned the first draft after his wife suggested it should be written as an allegory and not as a story. He re-wrote it in three to six days, and after a few weeks of editing and revision he published what would become one of his most famous and best-selling works.
The
...80) The Sea Fogs
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) was a Scottish novelist, poet and travel writer. A celebrity in his own time, Stevenson was seen for much of the 20th century as a second-class writer, his writings relegated to children's literature and horror genres. However, the late 20th century brought a re-evaluation of Stevenson as an artist of great range and insight, a master story-teller, an essayist and social critic, a witness to the colonial
...